But that isn’t really saying very much. Nobody in the ancient world really understood what caused diseases or how to cure them.

Did evil spirits make you sick?

Egyptian doctors mostly believed that evil spirits either got inside your body or sent poisons inside your body to make you sick. To cure you, the doctors made you eat or drink something very nasty-smelling. They hoped the evil spirit wouldn’t like the smell and would leave your body.

Or the doctors tried to clean your insides out to get rid of the poison, by giving you laxatives or bleeding you. And they prayed to Sekhmet, the goddess of healing. To cure a cold, they gave you human breast milk to drink.

Because Nile catfish could give electric shocks that seemed magical, Egyptian doctors tried using powdered catfish as a medicine. These magic things could really help you, because often people get better when they just see the doctor doing something.

Women doctors in ancient Egypt

Both men and women were doctors in ancient Egypt. In the Old Kingdom, about 2700 BC, Merit Ptah – a woman – was the Chief Physician. Two hundred years later, another woman, Peseshet, was the Supervisor of Doctors.

Egyptian medical treatments that worked

Early Egyptian dental bridge (Gordon Museum)

Ancient Egyptian medicine did also use effective medical treatments. Egyptian doctors massaged aching legs and calves, they stitched and bandaged wounds, and they set broken and dislocated arms and legs.

Specialized dentists pulled infected teeth and built bridges to replace lost teeth. They invented toothbrushes and toothpaste.

They tried to cure breast cancer by cutting out lumps and cauterizing the cancer with a “fire drill.” Midwives helped women with childbirth.

Egyptian doctors used powdered charcoal as a medicine to absorb poisons and cure food poisoning (as we still do today). They put powdered charcoal on wounds to absorb pus and blood and promote clotting.

Research on the human body

The biggest contribution of Egyptian doctors to medicine was their research on how the human body worked. They figured out that your pulse was related to your heart-beat. They learned that your bronchial tubes ran under your collarbones, from your throat to your lungs.

The foundation of the University of Alexandria in the 300s BC meant that Egyptian doctors continued to be leaders in medical research in the Hellenistic period. Almost immediately, the Greek doctor Praxagoras and his West Asian students Herophilus and Erasistratos moved to Alexandria. Maybe inspired by the Indian surgeon Sushruta, they took advantage of the new university’s freedom to cut open dead people’s bodies – and possibly also the bodies of enslaved people who were still alive! – in public demonstrations and learn more about how the human body worked.

Praxagoras thought that the arteries carried blood and the veins carried air, but Herophilus learned that veins also carried blood and that your pulse came from rhythmic throbbing of your veins. He realized that you thought with your brain, not your heart. Herophilus figured out the difference between blood vessels and nerves, and described the optic nerve that connects your brain to your eyes.

But he thought that there was a sort of life-force, which Herophilus called the pneuma (“breath“), that flowed throughout your body with the blood in your veins. And he thought that imbalances in your four humors blocked the pneuma from flowing to your brain.

But after the Black Death hit Egypt in the 1300s AD, under the Burjis, Egypt became much poorer, and couldn’t support great universities or great doctors anymore. After that, Europe became the center of medical research.

where did diagnosis, treatment, care take place?
were there separate doctors’ rooms? operating type theatres for surgery?
Thanks
Beatrice Hale

Karen Carr
April 10, 2018 at 10:08 pm

There’s actually a lot we don’t know about Egyptian medicine so long ago! But mostly doctors visited patients at the patient’s house, or else patients came to the doctor’s house, where they might have a room or two set aside for patients, or they might just receive them in the courtyard or reception room of the main house. Surgery without anesthesia had to take place very, very quickly before the patient died of shock from the pain. Mostly it was just stitching up wounds and setting broken bones. Sometimes doctors would make an incision to get out a gallstone, but typically they did it outside, in a courtyard, to keep the mess from getting all over the house. Operating rooms weren’t invented until anaesthesia, in the 1800s.

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